The Issue

by Eugene Debs
Speech given in Girard, Kansas
May 23, 1908

Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen: When I made inquiry a few moments ago
as to the cause of this assembling I was told that it was the beginning
of another street fair. I am quite surprised, and agreeably so, to find
myself the central attraction. Allow me in the very beginning to express
my heartiest appreciation of the more than kind and generous words which
have been spoken here for me this afternoon. There are times when words
- mere words - no matter how fitly chosen or well expressed - are almost
meaningless. As the rosebud under the influence of sunshine and shower
opens, so does my heart receive your benediction this afternoon.

I am a new resident of Girard; have been here but a comparatively
short time, and yet I feel myself as completely at home among you, most
of whom disagree with me upon very vital questions, as I do in the town
in which I was born and reared and have lived all the days of my life.
Since the day I first came here I have been treated with uniform
kindness. I could not have been treated more hospitably anywhere. I have
met practically all of your people, and all of them have taken me by the
hand and treated me as cordially as if I had been neighbor and friend
with them; and to say that I appreciate this is to express myself in
hackneyed and unsatisfactory terms.

AS TO THE PRESIDENCY

The honor to which reference has been made has come to me through
no fault of my own. It has been said that some men are born great, some
achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. It is even
so with what are called honors. Some men have honors thrust upon them. I
find myself in that class. I did what little I could to prevent myself
from being nominated by the convention now in session at Chicago, but
the nomination sought me out, and in spite of myself I stand in your
presence this afternoon the nominee of the Socialist party for the
presidency of the United States.

Long, long ago I made up my mind never again to be a candidate for
any political office within the gift of the people. I was constrained to
violate that vow because when I joined the Socialist party I was taught
that the desire of the individual was subordinate to the party will, and
that when the party commanded it was my duty to obey. There was a time
in my life when I had the vanities of youth, when I sought that bubble
called fame. I have outlived it. I have reached that point when I am
capable of placing an estimate upon my own relative insignificance. I
have come to realize that there is no honor in any real sense of that
term to any man unless he is capable of freely consecrating himself to
the service of his fellow men.

To the extent that I am able to help those who are unable to help
themselves, to that extent, and to that extent alone, do I honor myself
and the party to which I belong. So far as the presidency of the United
States is concerned, I would spurn it were it not that it conferred the
power to serve the working class, and he who enters that office with any
other conception of it prostitutes and does not honor that office.
THE BOUNTY OF NATURE.

Now, my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we
live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself,
but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that
there are thousands upon thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the
barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that
man's business upon this earth was to look out for himself. That was the
ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself,
no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the
question was asked: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That question has never
yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to
him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality, but by the
higher duty I owe to myself. What would you think of me if I were
capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and
saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death?

Allow me to say to you, my fellow men, that nature has spread a
great table bounteously for all of the children of men. There is room
for all and there is a plate and a place and food for all, and any
system of society that denies a single one the right and the opportunity
to freely help himself to nature's bounties is an unjust and iniquitous
system that ought to be abolished in the interest of a higher humanity
and a civilization worthy of the name. And here let me observe, my
fellow men, that while the general impression is that human society is
stationary - a finality as it were - it is not so for a single instant.
Underlying society there are great material forces that are in operation
all of the circling hours of the day and night, and at certain points in
the social development these forces outgrow the forms that hold them and
these forms spring apart and then a new social system comes into
existence and a new era dawns for the human race.

The great majority of mankind have always been in darkness. The
overwhelming majority of the children of men have always been their own
worst enemies. In every age of this world's history, the kings and
emperors and czars and potentates, in alliance with the priests, have
sought by all the means at their command to keep the people in darkness
that they might perpetuate the power in which they riot and revel in
luxury while the great mass are in a state of slavery and degradation,
and he who has spoken out courageously against the existing order, he
who has dared to voice the protest of the oppressed and downtrodden, has
had to pay the penalty, all the way from Jesus Christ of Galilee down to
Fred Warren of Girard.

CORONATIONS AND CRUCIFIXIONS

Do you know, my friends, it is so easy to agree with the ignorant
majority. It is so easy to make the people applaud an empty platitude.
It takes some courage to face that beast called the Majority, and tell
him the truth to his teeth! Some men do so and accept the consequences
of their acts as becomes men, and they live in history - every one of
them. I have said so often, and I wish to repeat it on this occasion,
that mankind have always crowned their oppressors, and they have as
uniformity crucified their saviors, and this has been true all along the
highway of the centuries. It is true today. It will not always be so.
When the great mass know the truth, they will treat an honest man
decently while he lives and not crucify him, and then a thousand years
afterward rear a monument above the dust of the hero they put to death.

I am in revolt against capitalism (and that doesn't mean to say,
my friends, that I am hating you - not the slightest). I am opposed to
capitalism because I love my fellow men, and if I am opposing you I am
opposing you for what I believe to be your good, and though you spat
upon me with contempt I should still oppose you to the extent of my
power.

NEW SYSTEM NEEDED

I don't hate the workingman because he has turned against me. I
know the poor fellow is too ignorant to understand his self-interest,
and I know that as a rule the workingman is the friend of his enemy and
the enemy of his friend. He votes for men who represent a system in
which labor is simply merchandise; in which the man who works the
hardest and longest has the least to show for it.

If there is a man on this earth who is entitled to all the
comforts and luxuries of this life in abundance it is the man whose
labor produces them. If he is not, who is? Does he get them in the
present system?

And, mark you, I am not speaking in a partisan sense this
afternoon. I appreciate the fact that you have come here as republicans
and democrats as well as Socialists to do me a personal honor, and I
would be ungrateful, indeed, if I took advantage of such an occasion to
speak to you in an offensive partisan sense. I wish to say in the
broadest possible way that I am opposing the system under which we live
today because I believe it is subversive of the best interests of the
people. I am not satisfied with things as they are, and I know that no
matter what administration is in power, even were it a Socialist
administration, there will be no material change in the condition of the
people until we have a new social system based upon the mutual economic
interests of the whole people; until you and I and all of us
collectively own those things that we collectively need and use.

That is a basic economic proposition. As long as a relatively few
men own the railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, own the oil fields
and the gas fields and the steel mills and the sugar refineries and the
leather tanneries - own, in short, the sources and means of life - they
will corrupt our politics, they will enslave the working class, they
will impoverish and debase society, they will do all things that are
needful to perpetuate their power as the economic masters and the
political rulers of the people. Not until these great agencies are owned
and operated by the people can the people hope for any material
improvement in their social condition.

Is the condition fair today, and satisfactory to the thinking man?

THE UNEMPLOYED

According to the most reliable reports at our command, as I speak
here this afternoon there are at least four millions of workingmen
vainly searching for employment. Have you ever found yourself in that
unspeakably sad predicament? Have you ever had to go up the street,
begging for work, in a great city thronged with humanity - and, by the
way, my friends, people are never quite so strange to each other as when
they are forced into artificial, crowded and stifled relationship.

I would rather be friendless out on the American desert than to be
friendless in New York or Chicago. Have you ever walked up one side of
the street and come back on the other side, while your wife, Mary, was
waiting at home with three or four children for you to report that you
had found work? Quite fortunately for me I had an experience of similar
nature quite early in my life. Quite fortunately because, had I not
known from my own experience just what it is to have to beg for work,
just what it is to be shown the door as if I were a very offensive
intruder, had I not known what it is to suffer for the want of food, had
I not seen every door closed and barred in my face, had I not found
myself friendless and alone in the city as a boy looking for work, and
in vain, perhaps I would not be here this afternoon. I might have grown
up, as some others have who have been, as they regard themselves,
fortunate. I might have waved aside my fellowmen and said, "Do as I have
done. If you are without work it is your own fault. Look at me; I am
self-made. No man is under the necessity of looking for work if he is
willing to work."

Nothing is more humiliating than to have to beg for work, and a
system in which any man has to beg for work stands condemned. No man can
defend it. Now the rights of one are as sacred as the rights of a
million. Suppose you happen to be the one who has no work. This republic
is a failure so far as you are concerned.

Every man has the inalienable right to work.

EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

Here I stand, just as I was created. I have two hands that
represent my labor power. I have some bone and muscle and sinew and some
energy. I want to exchange the use of these for food and clothing and
shelter. But between me and the tools with which work is done there
stands a man artificially created. He says, "No, no!" Why not? "Because
you cannot first make a profit for me."

Now, there has been a revolution in industry during the last fifty
years, but the trouble with most people is that they haven't kept pace
with it. They don't know anything about it and they are especially
innocent in regard to it in the small western cities and states, where
the same old conditions of a century ago still largely prevail. Your
grandfather could help himself anywhere. All he needed was some cheap,
simple primitive tools and he could then apply his labor to the
resources of nature with his individual tools and produce what he
needed. That era in our history produced our greatest men. Lincoln
himself sprang from this primitive state of society. People have said,
"Why, he had no chance. See how great he became." Yes, but Lincoln had
for his comrades great, green-plumed forest monarchs. He could put his
arms about them and hear their heart-throbs, as they whispered: "Go on,
Abe, a great destiny awaits you." He was in partnership with nature. He
associated with birds and bees and flowers, and he was in the fields and
heard the rippling music of the laughing brooks and streams. Nature took
him to her bosom and nourished him, and from his unpolluted heart there
sprang his noble aspirations.

Had Lincoln been born in a sweatshop he would never have been
heard of.

How is it with the babe that is born in Mott street, or in the
lower Bowery, or in the east side of New York City? That is where
thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of babes are born
who are to constitute our future generations.

I have seen children ten years of age in New York City who had
never seen a live chicken. The babes there don't know what it is to put
their tiny feet on a blade of grass. It is the most densely populated
spot on earth.

You have seen your bee-hive - just fancy a human bee-hive of which
yours is the miniature and you have the industrial hive under
capitalism. If you have never seen this condition you are excusable for
not being a Socialist. Come to New York, Chicago, San Francisco with me;
remain with me just twenty-four hours, and then look into my face as I
shall look into yours when I ask: "What about Socialism now?" These
children by hundreds and thousands are born in sub-cellars, where a
whole grown family is crowded together in one room, where modesty
between the sexes is absolutely impossible. They are surrounded by filth
and vermin. From their birth they see nothing but immorality and vice
and crime. They are tainted in the cradle. They are inoculated by their
surroundings and they are doomed from the beginning. This system takes
their lives just as certainly as if a dagger were thrust into their
quivering little hearts, and let me say to you that it were better for
many thousands of them if they had never seen the light.

Now I submit, my friends, that such a condition as this is
indefensible in the twentieth century. Time was when everything had to
be done in a very primitive way, and most men had to work all their
days, all their lives, to feed and shelter themselves. They had no time,
they had no opportunity for higher development, and so they were what
the world calls "illiterate." They had little chance. It took all their
time and energy to feed the animal; but how is it today? Upon the
average twenty men can today, with the aid of modern machinery, produce
as much wealth as a thousand did a half century ago. Can you think of a
single thing that enters into our daily existence that can not be easily
produced in abundance for all? If you can I wish you would do me the
kindness to name it.

WHY SUFFER AMID ABUNDANCE?

I don't know it all. I am simply a student of this great question,
and I am serving as best I can and I know my eyes are ready for the
light, and I thank that man, no matter what he be, who can add to the
flame of the torch I bear. If there is a single thing that you can think
of that cannot be produced in abundance, name it. Bread, clothing, fuel
- everything is here.

Nature's storehouse is full to the surface of the earth. All of
the raw materials are deposited here in abundance. We have the most
marvelous machinery the world has ever known. Man has long since become
master of the natural forces and made them work for him. Now he has but
to touch a button and the wheels begin to spin and the machinery to
whirr, and wealth is produced on every hand in increasing abundance.

Why should any man, woman or child suffer for food, clothing or
shelter? Why? The question cannot be answered. Don't tell me that some
men are too lazy to work. Suppose they are too lazy to work, what do you
think of a social system that produces men too lazy to work? If a man is
too lazy to work don't treat him with contempt. Don't look down upon him
with scorn as if you were a superior being. If there is a man who is too
lazy to work there is something the matter with him. He wasn't born
right or he was perverted in this system. You could not, if you tried,
keep a normal man inactive, and if you did he would go stark mad. Go to
any penitentiary and you will find the men there begging for the
privilege of doing work.

I know by close study of the question exactly how men become idle.
I don't repel them when I meet them. I have never yet seen the tramp I
was not able to receive with open arms. He is a little less fortunate
than I am. He is made the same as I am made. He is a child of the same
Father. Had I been born in his environment, had I been subjected to the
same things to which he was I would have been where he is.

TOOLS AND TRAMPS

Can you tell me why there wasn't a tramp in the United States in
1860? In that day, if some one had said "tramp," no one would have known
what was meant by it. If human nature is innately depraved and men would
rather ride on brake-beams and sleep in holes and caves instead of
comfortable beds, if they would do that from pure choice and from
natural depravity, why were they not built that way fifty years ago?
Fifty years ago capitalism was in its earlier stages. Fifty years ago
work was still mainly done by hand, and every boy could learn a trade
and every boy could master the tools and go to work. That is why there
were no tramps. In fifty years that simple tool has become a mammoth
machine. It gets larger and larger all the time. It has crowded the hand
tool out of production. With the machine came the capitalist.

There were no capitalists, nor was there such a thing as capital
before the beginning of the present system. Capitalists came with
machinery. Up to the time that machinery supplanted the hand tool the
little employer was himself a workingman. No matter what the shop or
factory, you would find the employer working side by side with his men.
He was a superior workman who got more orders than he could fill and
employed others to help him, but he had to pay them the equivalent of
what they produced because if he did not they would pack up their tools
and go into business for themselves.

Now, the individual tool has become the mammoth machine. It has
multiplied production by hundreds. The old tool was individually owned
and used. The modern tool, in the form of a great machine, is social in
every conception of it. Look at one of these giant machines. Come to the
Appeal office and look at the press in operation. Here the progressive
conception of the ages is crystallized. What individual shall put his
hand on this social agency and say, "This is mine! He who would apply
labor here must first pay tribute to me."

The hand tool has been very largely supplanted by this machine.
Not many tools are left. You are still producing in a very small way
here in Girard, but your production is flickering out gradually. It is
but a question of time until it will expire entirely. In spite of all
that can be said or done to the contrary production is organizing upon a
larger and larger scale and becoming entirely co-operative. This has
crowded out the smaller competitor and gradually opened the way for a
new social order.

WILL MAKE HOME POSSIBLE

Your material interest and mine in the society of the future will
be the same. Instead of having to fight each other like animals, as we
do today, and seeking to glorify the brute struggle for existence - of
which every civilized human being ought to be ashamed - instead of this,
our material interests are going to be mutual. We are going to jointly
own these mammoth machines, and we are going to operate them as joint
partners and we are going to divide all the products among ourselves.

We are not going to send our surplus to the Goulds and Vanderbilts
of New York. We are not going to pile up a billion of dollars in John D.
Rockefeller's hands - a vast pyramid from the height of which he can
look down with scorn and contempt upon the "common herd." John D.
Rockefeller's great fortune is built upon your ignorance. When you know
enough to know what your interest is you will support the great party
that is organized upon the principle of collective ownership of the
means of life. This party will sweep into power upon the issue of
emancipation just as republicanism swept into power upon the abolition
question half a century ago.

In the meantime, don't have any fear of us Socialists. We don't
mean any harm! Many of you have been taught to look upon us as very
dangerous people. It is amazing to what extent this prejudice has struck
root. The capitalist press will tell you of a good many evil things that
we Socialists are going to do that we never intend to do. They will tell
you we are going to break up the home. Great heaven! What about the
homes of the four million tramps that are looking for work today? How
about the thousands and thousands of miserable shacks in New York and
every great city where humanity festers? It would be a good thing if
they were torn down and obliterated completely, for they are not fit for
human habitation. No, we are not going to destroy the home, but we are
going to make the home possible for the first time in history.

PROGRESS BORN OF AGITATION

You may think you are very comfortable. Let me make you a little
comparison. You may not agree with me. I don't expect you to and I don't
ask you to. I am going to ask you to remember what I say this afternoon
and perhaps before I am elected president of the United States you will
believe what I say is true. Now there are those of you who are fairly
comfortable under the present standard. Isn't it amazing to you how
little the average man is satisfied with? You go out here to the edge of
town and you find a small farmer who has a cabin with just room enough
to keep himself and wife and two or three children, which has a mortgage
on it, and he works early and late and gets just enough in net returns
to keep him in working order, and he will deliver a lecture about the
wonderful prosperity of the country.

He is satisfied, and that is his calamity.

Now, the majority of you would say that is his good fortune. "It
is a blessing that he is satisfied." I want to see if I can show you
that it is a curse to him and to society that he is satisfied.

If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who have
not been satisfied with their condition you would still be living in
caves. You never would have emerged from the jungle. Intelligent
discontent is the mainspring of civilization.

Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation. I
have taken my choice.

This farmer works all day long, works hard enough to produce
enough to live the life of a man; not of an animal, but of a man. Now
there is an essential difference between a man and an animal. I admire a
magnificent animal in any form except in the human form. Suppose you had
everything that you could possibly desire, so far as your physical wants
are concerned. Suppose you had a million to your credit in the bank, a
palatial home and relations to suit yourself, but no soul capacity for
real enjoyment. If you were denied knowing what sorrow is, what real joy
is, what music is, and literature and sculpture, and all of those subtle
influences that touch the heart and quicken the pulses and fire the
senses, and so lift and ennoble a man that he can feel his head among
the stars and in communion with God himself - if you are denied these,
no matter how sleek or fat or contented you may be, you are still as
base and as corrupt and as repulsive a being as walks God's green earth.

THE FARMER'S NEED

You may have plenty of money. The poorest people on this earth are
those who have [the] most money. A man is said to be poor who has none,
but he is a pauper who has nothing else. Now this farmer, what does he
know about literature? After his hard day's work is done, here he sits
in his little shack. He is fed, and his animal wants are satisfied. It
is at this time that a man begins to live. It is not while you work and
slave that you live. It is when you have done your work honestly, when
you have contributed your share to the common fund, that you begin to
live. Then, as Whitman said, you can take out your soul; you can commune
with yourself; you can take a comrade by the hand and you can look into
his eyes and down into his soul, and in that holy communion you live.
And if you don't know what that is, or if you are not at least on the
edge of it, it is denied you to even look into the promised land.

Now this farmer knows nothing about the literature of the world.
All its libraries are sealed to him. So far as he is concerned, Homer
and Dante and Dickens might as well not have lived; Beethoven, Liszt and
Wagner, and all those musicians whose art makes the common atmosphere
blossom with harmony, never have been for this farmer. He knows nothing
about poetry or art. Never rises above the animal plane upon which he is
living. Within fifteen minutes after he has ceased to live he is
forgotten; the next generation doesn't know his name, and the world
doesn't know he ever lived. That is life under the present standard.

You tell me that is all the farmer is fit for? What do I propose
to do for that farmer? Nothing. I only want him to know that he is
robbed every day in the week, and if I can awaken him to the fact that
he is robbed under the capitalist system he will fall into line with the
Socialist movement, and will march to the polls on election day, and
instead of casting his vote to fasten the shackles upon his limbs more
firmly, he will vote for his emancipation. All I have to do is to show
that farmer, that day laborer, that tramp, that they are victims of this
system, that their interests are identical, that they constitute the
millions and that the millions have the votes. The Rockefellers have the
dollars, but we have the votes; and when we have sense enough to know
how to use the votes we will have not only the votes but the dollars for
all the children of men.

WHO WILL SAVE US FROM CONGRESS?

This seems quite visionary to some of you, and especially to those
of you who know nothing about economics. I could not begin to tell you
the story of social evolution this afternoon; of how these things are
doing day by day, of how the world is being pushed into Socialism, and
how it is bound to arrive, no matter whether you are for it or against
it. It is the next inevitable phase of civilization. It isn't a scheme,
it isn't a contrivance. It isn't anything that is made to order. The day
is coming when you will be pushed into it by unseen hands whether you
will or not. Nothing can be introduced until the people want it, and
when the majority want it they will know how to get it.

I venture the prophecy that within the next five years you will be
completely dispossessed. You are howling against the trusts, and the
trusts are laughing at you. You keep on voting in the same old way and
the trusts keep on getting what you produce. You say congress will give
you some relief. Good heavens! Who will save us from congress? Don't you
know that congress is made up almost wholly of trust lawyers and
corporation attorneys? I don't happen to have the roll of this one, but
with few exceptions they are all lawyers. Now, in the competitive system
the lawyer sells himself to the highest bidder the same as the
workingman does. Who is the highest bidder? The trust and corporation,
of course. So the trust buys the best lawyer and the common herd gets
the shyster.

POLITICS REFLEX OF ECONOMICS

Now it is a fact that politics is simply the reflex of economics.
The material foundation of society determines the character of all
social institutions - political, educational, ethical and spiritual. In
exact proportion as the economic foundation of society changes the
character of all social institutions changes to correspond to that
basis. Half of this country was in favor of chattel slavery, and half
was opposed to it, geographically speaking. Why was the church of the
south in favor of chattel slavery? Why was the church of the north
opposed to chattel slavery? The northern capitalist wasn't a bit more
opposed to chattel slavery from any moral sense than was the southern
plantation owner. The south produced cotton for the market by the hand
labor of negro slaves. On the other hand, the north wasn't dependent
upon cotton - could raise no cotton. In the north it was the small
capitalist at the beginning of capitalism, who, with the machine, had
begun to manufacture, and wanted cheap labor; and the sharper the
competition the cheaper he could buy his labor. Now, chattel slavery to
the southern plantation owner was the source of his wealth. He had to
have slaves, and what the plantation owner had to have in economics the
preacher had to justify in religion. As long as chattel slavery was
necessary to the southern plantation owner, as long as that stage of the
economic condition lasted, the preachers stood up in the pulpits of the
south and said it was ordained of God, and proved it by the Bible. I
don't know of any crime that the oppressors and their hirelings have not
proven by the Bible.

ANALOGIES FROM HISTORY

Then competition between workers began as machines took the place
of hand labor. Manufacturers wanted larger and larger bodies of labor
and that competition spread out here to Kansas, and I have always felt
when in Kansas that I stood on sacred soil. When I hear the name of
Kansas I doff my hat in reverence. The free soilers came here, despised,
hated and persecuted. They were the enemies of the human race. Why?
Because they had hearts throbbing within their breasts. Because they
looked with compassion upon the negro slave who received his wages in
lashes applied to his naked back; who saw his crying wife torn from him
and his children, pleading, snatched from his side and sold into
slavery, while the great mass looked on just as the great mass is
looking on today, and the preachers stood up in their pulpits and said:
"It is all right. It is God-ordained." And whenever an abolitionist
raised his head he was persecuted and hounded as if he had been a wild
beast.

I heard this story from Wendell Phillips one evening. I never can
forget it. How I wish he were here this afternoon! We sat together and
he said: "Debs, the world will never know with what bitter and
relentless persecution the early abolitionists had to contend."

Wendell Phillips was the most perfect aristocrat in the true sense
I have ever seen; came nearest being a perfect man. And yet he was
treated as if he had been the worst felon on earth. They went to his
house one night to mob him, and why? Because he protested against
sending a young negro girl back into slavery. They came to take her
back, and the whole commonwealth of Massachusetts said, "Take her back!
Obey the law!" That is what they are everlastingly saying to us - "Obey
the law!" Just above the door of the state house there was an
inscription: "God bless the Commonwealth of Massachusetts." Wendell
Phillips said: "If Massachusetts has become a slave hunter, if
Massachusetts is in alliance with the slave catchers of the south, the
inscription over that portal should be changed, and in place of 'God
Bless the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' it should be: 'God Damn the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts!'" God smiled in that same instant.

GROWTH OF SOCIALISM

All of the slave catchers and holders, all of the oppressors of
man, all of the enemies of the human race, all of the rulers of Siberia,
where a large part of this earth's surface has been transformed into a
hell - all have spoken in the name of the Great God and in the name of
the Holy Bible.

There will be a change one of these days. The world is just
beginning to awaken, and is soon to sing its first anthem of freedom.
All the signs of the times are cheering. Twenty-five years ago there was
but a handful of Socialists; today there are a half million. When the
polls are closed next fall you will be astounded. The Socialist movement
is in alliance with the forces of progress. We are today where the
abolitionists were in 1858. They had a million and a quarter of votes.
There was dissension in the whig, republican and free soil parties, but
the time had come for a great change, and the republican party was
formed in spite of the bickerings and contentions of men. Lincoln made
the great speech in that year that gave him the nomination and afterward
made him president of the United States.

If you had said to the people in 1858, "In two years from now the
republican party is going to sweep the country and seat the president,"
you would have been laughed to scorn. The Socialist party stands today
where the republican party stood fifty years ago. It is in alliance with
the forces of evolution, the one party that has a clear-cut,
overmastering, overshadowing issue; the party that stands for the
people, and the only party that stands for all the people. In this
system we have one set who are called capitalists, and another set who
are called workers; and they are at war with each other.

WILL ESTABLISH PRIVATE PROPERTY

Now, we Socialists propose that society in its collective capacity
shall produce, not for profit, but in abundance to satisfy human wants;
that every man shall have the inalienable right to work, and receive the
full equivalent of all he produces; that every man may stand fearlessly
erect in the pride and majesty of his own manhood.

Every man and every woman will then be economically free. They
can, without let or hindrance, apply their labor, with the best
machinery that can be devised, to all the natural resources, do the work
of society and produce for all; and then receive in exchange a
certificate of value equivalent to that of their production. Then
society will improve its institutions in proportion to the progress of
invention. Whether in the city or on the farm, all things productive
will be carried forward on a gigantic scale. All industry will be
completely organized. Society for the first time will have a scientific
foundation. Every man, by being economically free, will have some time
for himself. He can then take a full and perfect breath. He can enjoy
life with his wife and children, because then he will have a home.

We are not going to destroy private property. We are going to
establish private property - all the private property necessary to house
man, keep him in comfort and satisfy his wants. Eighty per cent of the
people of the United States have no property today. A few have got it
all. They have dispossessed the people, and when we get into power we
will dispossess them. We will reduce the workday and give every man a
chance. We will go to the parks, and we will have music, because we will
have time to play music and desire to hear it.

Is it not sad to think that not one in a thousand knows what music
is? Is it not pitiable to see the poor, ignorant, dumb human utterly
impervious to the divine influences of music? If humanity could only
respond to the higher influences! And it would if it had time.

Release the animal, throw off his burden; give him a chance and he
rises as if by magic to the plane of a man. Man has all of the divine
attributes. They are in a latent state. They are not yet developed. It
does not pay now to love music. Keep your eye on the almighty dollar and
your fellowman. Get the dollar and keep him down. Make him produce for
you. You are not your brother's keeper. Suppose he is poor! Suppose his
wife is forced into prostitution! Suppose his child is deformed
deformed! And suppose he shuffles off by destroying himself! What is
that to you?

But you ought to be ashamed. Take the standard home and look it in
the face. If you know what that standard means, and you are a success,
God help the failure!

Our conduct is determined by our economic relations. If you and I
must fight each other to exist, we will not love each ether very hard.
We can go to the same church and hear the same minister tell us in good
conscience that we ought to love each other, and the next day we
approach some business transaction. Do we remember what the minister
told us? No; it is gone until next Sunday. Six days in the week we are
following the Golden Rule reversed. Now, when we approach a business
transaction in competition, what is more natural than that we should try
to get the better of it? - get the better of our fellowman? - cheat him
if we can?

And if you succeed that fixes you as a business man. You have all
the necessary qualifications. Don't let your conscience disturb you -
that would interfere with business.

HUMANITY AND THE FUTURE

Competition was natural enough at one time, but do you think you
are competing today? Many of you think you are competing. Against whom?
Against Rockefeller? About as I would if I had a wheelbarrow and
competed with the Santa Fe from here to Kansas City. That is about the
way you are competing; but your boys will not have even that chance - if
capitalism lives that long. You hear of the "late" panic. It is very
late. It is going to be very late. This panic will be with us five years
from now, and will continue till then.

I am not a prophet. I can no more penetrate the future than you
can. I do study the forces that underlie society and the trend of
evolution. I can tell by what we have passed through about what we will
have in the future; and I know that capitalism can be abolished and the
people put in possession. Now, when we have taken possession, and we
jointly own the means of production, we will no longer have to fight
each other to live; our interests, instead of being competitive, will be
cooperative. We will work side by side. Your interest will be mine and
mine will be yours. That is the economic condition from which will
spring the humane social relation of the future.

When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other's
throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand
together, hands clasped, and be friends. We will be comrades, we will be
brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the
human race has ever known.

I did not mean to keep you so long this afternoon. I am sure I
appreciate the patience with which you have listened to me. From the
very depths of my heart I thank you, each of you - every man, woman and
child - for this splendid testimonial, this beautiful tribute, which I
shall remember with gratitude and love until memory empties its urn into
forgetfulness.